Garden State Parkway

Making a beeline for the shoreline; or, the reason why there's Snooki

Feature Article from Hemmings Motor News

New Jersey had a problem. Post-war, the endless stoplights on coastal Route 9 meant it took more than three and a quarter hours to get from Paterson, near the top of the state, to Atlantic City. With the failure of the Route 4 Parkway to get off the ground (only 11 miles built through 1950), New Jersey took a tip from adjoining New York and whipped up a Highway Authority, charged with building a road that went the length of the state.

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The Garden State Parkway started construction in 1952, the same year Gov. Alfred E. Driscoll got the idea approved by popular vote (by nearly a 2-1 margin). Sections opened as early as 1954, and connected to the New York Thruway by 1957. The Parkway passes through 50 municipalities in 10 counties between Cape May and the New York State line at Montvale. Cost? $330 million in mid-1950s money ($49 million in property acquisition alone), to be recouped by tollbooths placed intermittently along the roadway, and at exits where bond money had to be raised.
Harold Griffin became chief engineer on the project; Griffin is widely credited with inventing the singing shoulder (rumble strips), the reflective curb and the traffic circle. He worked closely with landscape architect Gilmore Clarke to make the Parkway a road of surprising beauty (in parts). Clarke's design prototypes combined his Merritt Parkway, which stressed a planted "green belt" for beauty, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a model of efficiency with parallels in the German Autobahn. The Parkway was always meant to be more than just a point-A-to-point-B road: beyond serving the needs of the communities it bisected, the Parkway was a completely modern post-war design.
After reading studies by the Pennsylvania Turnpike authority which discussed its long, straight stretches of road and the driver fatigue it would cause, GSP planners wound their way through the state's rolling topography, gently banking stretches of the curves, to reduce driver fatigue. Guard rails were initially wooden beams attached to reinforced concrete posts, to give a more rustic feel. Northbound and southbound lanes did not necessarily run exactly parallel; and trees in the wide median (up to 600 feet in some places) served to reduce glare from oncoming headlights at night. The medians were so wide that, in the "Shore" section south of the Raritan River, service areas serving both northbound and southbound travelers could be established. Yet stark realities came to pass as well: The Parkway grows increasingly urban once you cross the Raritan and enter Woodbridge and the "Metropolitan" section; you even pass through a cemetery in West Orange as you keep up with the flow of traffic, officer.
Once the full length of the Parkway was up and running, travelers could nearly halve their travel time between Paterson and Atlantic City. By 1959, toll revenues were 10 percent above estimates; the reserves were invested in future operational expenses.
The Parkway even had a pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair.
One effect, unforeseen or otherwise: It spurred development and new waves of tourism along the shore; the population of Ocean County alone grew five-fold from 1950 to 1976. It also means that, in part, we can blame the Parkway for Snooki and the Situation.
Today, the Parkway is as wide as 12 lanes in the shore areas, yet the speed limit was only increased to 65 MPH (in portions) in 1998. The entire length of this historic road is now eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.

This article originally appeared in the December, 2012 issue of Hemmings Motor News.